By Charles Smith
Charles Smith Games
OSE
Levels 1-3
In the village of Edgewamp, ancient bad blood has finally led to bloodshed, and from this a new and terrible mosquito god has been conceived. Now monstrous mosquito-men steal away the inhabitants of Edgewamp to be drained of their bodily fluids in a secret sunken temple in the swamp, where the god-fetus waiting to be born screams out for blood… and the treasures of hell itself wait to be looted.
This seventeen page adventure presents a small swamp temple with seven room and some giant mosquito action. It has that kind of farcical tone combined with some depression that I really enjoy, but takes it too far in to comedy in the last bits of the adventure. It’s doing a pretty good job until it can’t figure out to write a temple dungeon.
Small swamp town. Two feuding families. Things go too far, someone gets killed and blah blah blah, an accident happens and a new temple rises from the swamp, with a new god gestating in it. Mosquito men and giant mosquitos raid the town … and one, killed, was adorned in LOTS of jewelry. There’s some motivation for you 🙂 I’m going to cover this thing in two parts: everything before the swamp temple and then the end: the swamp temple.
This has a wonderful tone to it. It just hits, over and over again. Specificity. Humans acting like humans. A little farce/hyper realism and just a tiny amount of folklore, if you squint. That hook I mentioned sets the scene: there’s loot on the mosquito men. Sure, people are dying, but the bell rang/there’s loot! The town leader is “Big head, wide-set eyes, meticulously well-kempt. “ and VERY fond of ceremony. And will waste the parties time at every opportunity through rubbing elbows. You know the type. And I do! The sheriff, prob a drunk now, who things this is all his fault. A capulet drinking himself stupid in the bar because he KNOWS it was his fault cause when he stabbed that Montague in the swamp he mouthed off, being silly. “Let your blood be resigned to whatever dark god resides here.” Which is a pretty cold thing to say to someone as they die. Unless it summons a new god, of course. His two buds are witnesses. Wonder if he gets drunk and shuts them up to hide things? The bar hirelings are great “: Huge, arms like tree-trunks, big ears. Doesn’t know where he is, only that he’s here to fight bugs. Very kind, and fiercely loyal if treated halfway decent. Zero survival instinct”. And then there’s the head Capulet, arm in a sling, all withered and drained cause of a giant mosquito attack, willing to put the feud aside. And others in the village not willing to. It just hits and hits and hits with the kind of petty social situation that can blow up and helps bring everything to bright color. Situations, opportunities, chances for the party to interact. It’s fucking great. Just reality, pushed a tony bit further. Transition to the swamp journey and you get The New Center Of The Universe, a bullwug camp overflowing with pomp and circumstance. “A gullygug dressed in the mud-caked finery of kings, but with a strong preference for quantity over quality. Wears three capes unless the situation calls for more. “ And then a wanderer called The Country Grig Jamboree, where a grig band passes by and invites you to dance. Doing so ends well. Not doing so causes them to try and do their charm shit. That’s a great fey encounter! They are not just being assholes. The PARTY are the assholes, for not dancing. Rude. Also, the bullywugs hate the grogs, and there are some half-bullywugs in town you might accidentally get in to your party … It’s all connected man! Maybe the weakest of the special is Mother Sweettooth the swamp hag. She’s just a monster with nothing special about her, which is sad considering all of the specificity and situations everything else brought to the table up to this point.
And then we go over the edge.The temple. Seven rooms. The map has the “always on” features on it, which is great. But it also lacks any other features. Giant staircase in the first room, leading to the second level? Not on the map. NOTHING is on the map. More importantly than this, though, is the tone. If the adventure up to now, with the town and swamp, touched on being lightly farcical and perhaps a little folklorish, this thing just is full on comedy. And comedy doesn’t work in adventures. You can throw in some shit here and there, but if you explicitly lean in to it then its gonna fall flat. Three mosquito-men scribes in a room argue. “They speak the common tongue, although one of the points of contention is whether “mosquito-man” should be a language, and if so what should the grammatical rules be, and has anyone considered how a new language is going to impact the rhyming scheme of the three half finished poems we already agreed on?” This is one of your seven encounters. Another is a priest casting the bones for divinations. But his god isn’t a god yet so it doesn’t work. But that doesn’t stop him. And he does it for literally EVERY decision he makes, even if he is being taken advantage of. The dungeon just isn’t large enough, at seven rooms, to support this sort of aside rooms. In something larger? Sure.Room six dazzles us with the following, complete description: “Pile of dried up bloodless bodies, along with some of their treasure. “
The language falls down. The specificity is absent. Where it exists it devolves in to comedic fantasy. Everything up until now has been great and, now, that the main event is at hand, it just doesn’t exist anymore. Stab some things and then meet people wearing funny hats doing silly walks and then stab them. This is NOT what the adventure was up until this point. The hag encounter is the closest it comes, where we get a Mother Sweettooth name, but nothing else but a monster. No situation. And the temple has no situations other than those comedic ones. It’s just fucking boring when you get to what would normally be considered “the main part.” (Blah blah blah, journey is the destination, the friends we made along the way.)
It’s a hard pass, but also the designer is not on the No Go list. Let’s see what the future holds and if they can seal the deal after all of the flirting.
“[Town NPC] Is pretty sure he can find the mosquito-man lair. He’s wrong, won’t admit it until 3 days of wandering fruitlessly in the swamp.”
This is $2 at DriveThru. Alas, there is no preview, and thus I cann;t share with you the good parts of it.
“the treasures of hell itself wait to be looted”
Hmmm… we have such sights to show you?
I’m out!
/rolls on down the road to the next frontier village, sees what’s happening there.